The problem

Teams over-deliver on availability targets with hot standbys and full duplicates, doubling infrastructure for downtime the business could tolerate.

The fix you can use today

• Agree availability targets with the business, per service.
• Design each service to its target, not to the most critical one's.
• Review standby capacity against real incident history.

The Green Software Foundation suggests matching uptime targets to what the business really needs. GreenCode draws on these patterns when it checks software.

Tools that help

• Cloud Carbon Footprint: estimates the energy and emissions of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud usage from billing and usage data

How GreenCode helps

GreenCode helps tackle this by mining a running estate, rebuilding it as infrastructure as code and tracing energy and CO2e to the services that cause it, including services barely running at all. More on this.

Tags

#resilience#cost#governance

Sources

• Green Software Foundation, Green Software Patterns: Match your service level objectives to business needs
• Microsoft, Azure Well-Architected sustainability (Reliability): right-size failover environments, review replication and backups
• Microsoft, Azure Well-Architected sustainability (Reliability): align resiliency to business continuity requirements, question multi-region
• W3C, Web Sustainability Guidelines: favour standalone over multi-zone when requirements allow; provision for average load

All GreenCode Tech Tips